Thank you. This is expressed so clearly. I am both a Christian and a liberal. I do believe my faith is a positive good and better than other belief systems, and also respect the rights of others to disagree with this assertion.
That was a very interesting exchange you had with Sarah, Helen. Thanks for sharing it! It is a bit challenging to see the path forward through these messy theological disputes that are breaking out all over the 'western world', but I found your commitment to your liberal principles quite inspiring.
Excellent: The first is a failure to distinguish between respect for freedom of belief and respect for all beliefs. Liberalism requires the former, not the latter. Respecting someone’s right to believe something does not entail believing that their beliefs are good, true, or harmless. That position is not liberalism but relativism.
The notion that moderate Muslims can/ are likely to prevail is most improbable. Most moderates, Muslim or otherwise, do what they are told. And the west is phobic when it comes to telling ethnic minorities what to do, and so has had to dress the whole thing as multi culturalism - with any failures blamed on the racism/ Islamophobia of the indigenous. It’s a mess
I think Sarah A. probably recognizes the distinction between trying to persuade people into a different set of beliefs and trying to exterminate them, but she also knows that most progressives are sentimentalists who are guided almost entirely by their addiction to pity, like a weak schoolteacher who allows her class to devolve into chaos as she is played by one student after another, all farming her sympathy to use her against each other, and genocide/Nazi imagery is like a Batsignal for them to attack whomever the image is projected onto.
Yes, it is doable. And Muslims in liberal democracies have every opportunity to go with liberal interpretations and we must urge those who already do to intervene on those who will not. Because radical solutions are gaining in popularity and there is a real risk that they will result in the election of political leaders who do not care if any individual Muslim is committed to peaceful co-existence and respecting the rights of women, same-sex attracted people, religious dissenters etc. They'll just want to ban Islam and deport Muslims.
Many of the people who get annoyed with me for urging liberal and reforming Muslims to be more visible and for others to support them get that way because they do not want liberal Muslims to exist or reform to be possible. They want the radical options.
I don't have an issue with 'liberal and reforming' Muslims. They are the only ones among them who are compatible with Western Civilization. The remainder may have some good qualities, but we cannot have them trying to impose their ways upon the rest of us via the ballot box or whatever.
With hateful comments like brain dead Americans (given ur English lol) and telling you to burn in hell, you’re giving Sarah way to much credit. The practice of Islam in Iran in the 1970s indeed shows the practice of Islam can be more liberal and it’s people thrive.
Sarah also conveniently lives in America where her equal rights as a woman are protected….not in any number of the 54 Muslim majority nations where she would be considered property. So it’s easy to say all the things she says while not actually being subjected to the regressive laws she proscribes for the rest of us.
Sarah is a hypocrite. Why is she here arguing with you? Would she walk into a mosque or neighborhood in Dearborn speaking this way? Of course not. She knows that would be extremely dangerous.
She prefers to spew her nonsense within the protection of Western Civilization.
I think it is important to keep in mind that the Koran is full of sourates that explicitly say that kuffar (polytheist, Christian , jews and unbielivers) will always try to humiliate or subjugate muslims, and that muslims will get their revenge.
So for many Muslims , saying that they are discriminated or humiliated by non-muslims is an act of faith, whatever their real situation is. That is why the debate on Islamophobia is so complicated.
But of course, if Islamists will not live by the rules of liberalism, and insist on attacking people who do live by the rules of liberalism, liberal tolerance is no longer possible, and liberals will have to deal with them according to the metarules of war. Sarah, like so many, call a resolute war of self-defense, fought against illiberals determined to fight to the death "genocide".
Ok, gonna try and provoke some brain waves for a minute to get you out of your immediate, reflexive tribalism here:
If a group of Muslims living in England declared war against the English state and the establishment of a caliphate within, what percentage of English Muslims do you ACTUALLY think would support them?
This gives some indication. The biggest worry is not really a revolution, though, but use of the democratic process. We already have Muslim MPs elected on platforms of promoting Muslim interests and they have already tried to make insulting Islam illegal.
These surveys are abstract. I know a lot of first and second generation Muslims, and whatever they say to surveyors, the truth is their appetite for these changes would be very low. Only the most powerless among them- women who don’t speak English and were born abroad- would really want it, and only then because their lives couldn’t get worse, and the application of Sharia law might mean their husbands and sons would treat them better. Educated second gen kids lie to their parents about almost everything, and uneducated second gen kids are 80% shiftless potheads and nitrous addicts who would be executed by the state lol
Controlling for youth itself? Many of those saying they want sharia law are not living any kind of religious life. In fact most would be considered quite degenerate even by western standards. I know this is no real obstacle to religious radicalism as people have no real
Issue overcoming cognitive dissonance (including your Sarah who does not wear hijab and almost certainly drinks alcohol) but it does make me less concerned that they’ll do any of the things they say. And for what it’s worth…. Like I couldn’t have a better insight into the U.K. Muslim population without actually being a member of it, and actually probably see it more clearly than most of them do.
There's two elements there. Yes, people who live sinful lives according to Islam are often represented in suicide bombings because they want to redeem themselves. Young people are more likely to wear hijab or burka than their parents and against their parents wishes and hold radical views as a form of cultural identity because they have no common identity with their former country as their parents did.
But we can only go by what statistics tell us and by real life impact. London is now 13% less tolerant of homosexuality than the general population and it was the centre for sexual liberation. Of course, liberal Muslims exist. I am appealing to them after all. But they're just much less likely to be liberal statistically and the incidents of illiberal beliefs are much higher.
Yes, I also have much personal experience of Muslim communities. I was at the University of East London about 12 years ago. The student meetings kept getting shut down by the Islamic Society objections to the LGBT society existing and the head of the Humanist society being a woman from a Muslim background. Nothing could ever get done. And this:
I appreciate your comments. There’s an important difference between abstract theological discussion, charged theological accusations on social media, and religion as it’s actually lived out as the patterns and practices of a family.
I also appreciated your point about second-generation immigrants lieing to their parents. I was at a company retreat recently, and I can say that this holds true across many faith traditions.
How about, at the very least, you expect the best and prepare for the worst? Not all Tommy Robinson like, but not like a dead ringer for mythic Pollyanna either.
The way you are starting this discussion is so rude. In any case, if Muslims were as liberal-minded as you claim, why aren't they more vocal about it? I don't see that liberalism anywhere in the media. Very few heterodox voices. It's cuktural. I have heard my Muslim HS students say they are taught not to criticize Muslims in public. Islam means submission. It is theologically and culturally illiberal. I don't want this to be true. I wish it wasn't. Even Tommy Robinson agrees with you. He says he knows lots of assimilated Muslims who drink in pubs and don't care about the religion. But they aren't politically active and they have strong cultural ties to their home cultures. There simply isn't a counter weight in Muslim countries or in the Muslim west.
Thanks for attempting to rescue me from reflexive tribalism. As you probably know, reflexes are pre-conscious and tricky, so I'm afraid I might need further assistance from you. First, what tribe have I tribalized myself into? Second, I'm unclear what group I've tribalized against. Am I opposing Muslims (members of a religious faith) or Islamists (members of a political ideology)?
Thanks Helen for a great piece. In North America we are more aware of Christian anti-liberalism than Islam. However, my own liberal religion (Unitarianism) is a movement that evolved from Christian roots. Are there branches of Islam that also have embraced liberal ideals without shedding their Islam beliefs. Sufiis?? Sarah claims this is impossible. I honestly don't know.
Yes, Sufis and Ahmadis. But way more Muslims who just hold their religion as a kind of cultural identification and have liberalised their actual beliefs.
I never suppose that anything will happen. I only say what must happen if an ideology is to be acceptable in a liberal society. That was going to be the second part of that piece. As well as people telling me I don't seem to realise that I'm asking Muslims to radically change their faith, I also have people telling me I believe that Islam is going to become liberal. That is never my claim whether I am criticising the woke left, woke right or anybody. I am setting out what liberals have a responsibility to demand of people and what we must not tolerate a rejection of.
Helen, I misunderstood your project. Thank you for clarifying. What are the odds, do you think, of a liberal Islam developing in the West before there is violent conflict?
On the level of a civil war, you mean? There is already violent conflict, of course. That is what worries me. People getting into entrenched positions to either demonise all Muslims or defend Islam as a narrative and not accepting those two premises I set out. That 1) there is genuine cause for concern about plausible interpretations of Islam and 2) many Muslims are good people, friends and neighbours who want to peacefully co-exist.
I fear that, in my country, anti-Muslim sentiment is going to continue to grow and we will see an increase of violent conflict. More anti-immigration, anti-Islam protests that turn violent and more violent demonstrations from Muslims about both this and the Palestine Action ban and related international issues. I think the anti-Muslim sentiment will win out because it has the numbers and because tensions are growing rapidly about quite genuine problems with uncontrolled immigration (people of all races and backgrounds are concerned about this). I fear less that this could develop into a full-blown society-wide violent conflict than that it could result in the election of political leaders that take a hard-line blanket stance against Islam and that this would not distinguish people by what values they hold and how they behave. I think this would be bad.
The only thing I believe that could simmer this down now is for there to be a move away from the tribal positions of "All Muslims are evil and a threat" and "Islam is wonderful & all objections are racist" and that this can only be achieved by a movement of liberal Muslims visibly distinguishing themselves from those who hold values and behave in ways that cause legitimate concern. I don't think most people are die-hard tribalists with a hard-line position on Islam, but that's who we are hearing from. I think most people still support treating people as individuals. Give them a visible and sizeable demographic of liberal Muslims pushing back at illiberal Muslims and they will oppose hard-line blanket policies against Muslims and support liberal Muslims in opposing illiberal Muslims and this will incentivise the forming of policies based on values and behaviour and not religious identity. That is why I am urging liberal Muslims to do this. Give the rest of us a clear movement to support so that we can support you.
Do I think such a movement is likely to form quickly enough to achieve this? Frankly, no. I have seen some liberal Muslims trying to achieve this. I linked one in the piece. I respect the hell out of them. But is it enough? No. I think anti-Muslim sentiment will continue to rise. I think it will win out. I think the UK will become a hostile place for Muslims and many will stop wanting to come here and will leave. That will resolve some of the legitimate concerns about authoritarian Islam but liberal, reforming and just generally decent and non-authoritarian Muslim Brits who absolutely hold the values we want to prosper and are good friends and neighbours will be the casualties of that. I would very much like that not to be the case but I am afraid it will be. So, I argue for what I think would make that not happen, but I am not optimistic about it.
Thank you. This is expressed so clearly. I am both a Christian and a liberal. I do believe my faith is a positive good and better than other belief systems, and also respect the rights of others to disagree with this assertion.
Excellent! This is what we need!
That was a very interesting exchange you had with Sarah, Helen. Thanks for sharing it! It is a bit challenging to see the path forward through these messy theological disputes that are breaking out all over the 'western world', but I found your commitment to your liberal principles quite inspiring.
Excellent: The first is a failure to distinguish between respect for freedom of belief and respect for all beliefs. Liberalism requires the former, not the latter. Respecting someone’s right to believe something does not entail believing that their beliefs are good, true, or harmless. That position is not liberalism but relativism.
It is impossible for someone who believes they are speaking for Allah to accept the other side of an argument; any argument.
Why all Theocracies eventually fail or rot out due to corruption. Man cannot be invested with notions of infallibility.
The notion that moderate Muslims can/ are likely to prevail is most improbable. Most moderates, Muslim or otherwise, do what they are told. And the west is phobic when it comes to telling ethnic minorities what to do, and so has had to dress the whole thing as multi culturalism - with any failures blamed on the racism/ Islamophobia of the indigenous. It’s a mess
I think Sarah A. probably recognizes the distinction between trying to persuade people into a different set of beliefs and trying to exterminate them, but she also knows that most progressives are sentimentalists who are guided almost entirely by their addiction to pity, like a weak schoolteacher who allows her class to devolve into chaos as she is played by one student after another, all farming her sympathy to use her against each other, and genocide/Nazi imagery is like a Batsignal for them to attack whomever the image is projected onto.
There are plenty of moderate Moslems in the world. Indonesia, the country with the most Moslems, is moderate.
Yes, it is doable. And Muslims in liberal democracies have every opportunity to go with liberal interpretations and we must urge those who already do to intervene on those who will not. Because radical solutions are gaining in popularity and there is a real risk that they will result in the election of political leaders who do not care if any individual Muslim is committed to peaceful co-existence and respecting the rights of women, same-sex attracted people, religious dissenters etc. They'll just want to ban Islam and deport Muslims.
Many of the people who get annoyed with me for urging liberal and reforming Muslims to be more visible and for others to support them get that way because they do not want liberal Muslims to exist or reform to be possible. They want the radical options.
Yes, perceived lack of results breeds more radical solutions.
I don't have an issue with 'liberal and reforming' Muslims. They are the only ones among them who are compatible with Western Civilization. The remainder may have some good qualities, but we cannot have them trying to impose their ways upon the rest of us via the ballot box or whatever.
Yeah.
Varies by region. Parts of Sumatra sound pretty hardline.
With hateful comments like brain dead Americans (given ur English lol) and telling you to burn in hell, you’re giving Sarah way to much credit. The practice of Islam in Iran in the 1970s indeed shows the practice of Islam can be more liberal and it’s people thrive.
Sarah also conveniently lives in America where her equal rights as a woman are protected….not in any number of the 54 Muslim majority nations where she would be considered property. So it’s easy to say all the things she says while not actually being subjected to the regressive laws she proscribes for the rest of us.
Sarah is a hypocrite. Why is she here arguing with you? Would she walk into a mosque or neighborhood in Dearborn speaking this way? Of course not. She knows that would be extremely dangerous.
She prefers to spew her nonsense within the protection of Western Civilization.
I think it is important to keep in mind that the Koran is full of sourates that explicitly say that kuffar (polytheist, Christian , jews and unbielivers) will always try to humiliate or subjugate muslims, and that muslims will get their revenge.
So for many Muslims , saying that they are discriminated or humiliated by non-muslims is an act of faith, whatever their real situation is. That is why the debate on Islamophobia is so complicated.
Can you say more about this? I haven't read this before.
But of course, if Islamists will not live by the rules of liberalism, and insist on attacking people who do live by the rules of liberalism, liberal tolerance is no longer possible, and liberals will have to deal with them according to the metarules of war. Sarah, like so many, call a resolute war of self-defense, fought against illiberals determined to fight to the death "genocide".
Ok, gonna try and provoke some brain waves for a minute to get you out of your immediate, reflexive tribalism here:
If a group of Muslims living in England declared war against the English state and the establishment of a caliphate within, what percentage of English Muslims do you ACTUALLY think would support them?
https://www.secularism.org.uk/news/2016/12/over-40-percent-of-uk-muslims-support-aspects-of-sharia-law
This gives some indication. The biggest worry is not really a revolution, though, but use of the democratic process. We already have Muslim MPs elected on platforms of promoting Muslim interests and they have already tried to make insulting Islam illegal.
These surveys are abstract. I know a lot of first and second generation Muslims, and whatever they say to surveyors, the truth is their appetite for these changes would be very low. Only the most powerless among them- women who don’t speak English and were born abroad- would really want it, and only then because their lives couldn’t get worse, and the application of Sharia law might mean their husbands and sons would treat them better. Educated second gen kids lie to their parents about almost everything, and uneducated second gen kids are 80% shiftless potheads and nitrous addicts who would be executed by the state lol
Not the case here. Much evidence that 2nd and 3rd generation British Muslims have more radical views than their parents.
Controlling for youth itself? Many of those saying they want sharia law are not living any kind of religious life. In fact most would be considered quite degenerate even by western standards. I know this is no real obstacle to religious radicalism as people have no real
Issue overcoming cognitive dissonance (including your Sarah who does not wear hijab and almost certainly drinks alcohol) but it does make me less concerned that they’ll do any of the things they say. And for what it’s worth…. Like I couldn’t have a better insight into the U.K. Muslim population without actually being a member of it, and actually probably see it more clearly than most of them do.
There's two elements there. Yes, people who live sinful lives according to Islam are often represented in suicide bombings because they want to redeem themselves. Young people are more likely to wear hijab or burka than their parents and against their parents wishes and hold radical views as a form of cultural identity because they have no common identity with their former country as their parents did.
But we can only go by what statistics tell us and by real life impact. London is now 13% less tolerant of homosexuality than the general population and it was the centre for sexual liberation. Of course, liberal Muslims exist. I am appealing to them after all. But they're just much less likely to be liberal statistically and the incidents of illiberal beliefs are much higher.
Yes, I also have much personal experience of Muslim communities. I was at the University of East London about 12 years ago. The student meetings kept getting shut down by the Islamic Society objections to the LGBT society existing and the head of the Humanist society being a woman from a Muslim background. Nothing could ever get done. And this:
https://substack.com/@helenpluckrose/note/c-191788616?utm_source=notes-share-action&r=1nm3qt
I appreciate your comments. There’s an important difference between abstract theological discussion, charged theological accusations on social media, and religion as it’s actually lived out as the patterns and practices of a family.
I also appreciated your point about second-generation immigrants lieing to their parents. I was at a company retreat recently, and I can say that this holds true across many faith traditions.
How about, at the very least, you expect the best and prepare for the worst? Not all Tommy Robinson like, but not like a dead ringer for mythic Pollyanna either.
The way you are starting this discussion is so rude. In any case, if Muslims were as liberal-minded as you claim, why aren't they more vocal about it? I don't see that liberalism anywhere in the media. Very few heterodox voices. It's cuktural. I have heard my Muslim HS students say they are taught not to criticize Muslims in public. Islam means submission. It is theologically and culturally illiberal. I don't want this to be true. I wish it wasn't. Even Tommy Robinson agrees with you. He says he knows lots of assimilated Muslims who drink in pubs and don't care about the religion. But they aren't politically active and they have strong cultural ties to their home cultures. There simply isn't a counter weight in Muslim countries or in the Muslim west.
Thanks for attempting to rescue me from reflexive tribalism. As you probably know, reflexes are pre-conscious and tricky, so I'm afraid I might need further assistance from you. First, what tribe have I tribalized myself into? Second, I'm unclear what group I've tribalized against. Am I opposing Muslims (members of a religious faith) or Islamists (members of a political ideology)?
isn’t this exactly the Paradox of Tolerance?
No, that is always about harm. That is what we cannot tolerate.
Thanks Helen for a great piece. In North America we are more aware of Christian anti-liberalism than Islam. However, my own liberal religion (Unitarianism) is a movement that evolved from Christian roots. Are there branches of Islam that also have embraced liberal ideals without shedding their Islam beliefs. Sufiis?? Sarah claims this is impossible. I honestly don't know.
Yes, Sufis and Ahmadis. But way more Muslims who just hold their religion as a kind of cultural identification and have liberalised their actual beliefs.
Sarah's mad responses to you are not unusual from Muslims.
Your mistake, Helen, is to suppose that Islam is reformable.
I never suppose that anything will happen. I only say what must happen if an ideology is to be acceptable in a liberal society. That was going to be the second part of that piece. As well as people telling me I don't seem to realise that I'm asking Muslims to radically change their faith, I also have people telling me I believe that Islam is going to become liberal. That is never my claim whether I am criticising the woke left, woke right or anybody. I am setting out what liberals have a responsibility to demand of people and what we must not tolerate a rejection of.
Helen, I misunderstood your project. Thank you for clarifying. What are the odds, do you think, of a liberal Islam developing in the West before there is violent conflict?
On the level of a civil war, you mean? There is already violent conflict, of course. That is what worries me. People getting into entrenched positions to either demonise all Muslims or defend Islam as a narrative and not accepting those two premises I set out. That 1) there is genuine cause for concern about plausible interpretations of Islam and 2) many Muslims are good people, friends and neighbours who want to peacefully co-exist.
I fear that, in my country, anti-Muslim sentiment is going to continue to grow and we will see an increase of violent conflict. More anti-immigration, anti-Islam protests that turn violent and more violent demonstrations from Muslims about both this and the Palestine Action ban and related international issues. I think the anti-Muslim sentiment will win out because it has the numbers and because tensions are growing rapidly about quite genuine problems with uncontrolled immigration (people of all races and backgrounds are concerned about this). I fear less that this could develop into a full-blown society-wide violent conflict than that it could result in the election of political leaders that take a hard-line blanket stance against Islam and that this would not distinguish people by what values they hold and how they behave. I think this would be bad.
The only thing I believe that could simmer this down now is for there to be a move away from the tribal positions of "All Muslims are evil and a threat" and "Islam is wonderful & all objections are racist" and that this can only be achieved by a movement of liberal Muslims visibly distinguishing themselves from those who hold values and behave in ways that cause legitimate concern. I don't think most people are die-hard tribalists with a hard-line position on Islam, but that's who we are hearing from. I think most people still support treating people as individuals. Give them a visible and sizeable demographic of liberal Muslims pushing back at illiberal Muslims and they will oppose hard-line blanket policies against Muslims and support liberal Muslims in opposing illiberal Muslims and this will incentivise the forming of policies based on values and behaviour and not religious identity. That is why I am urging liberal Muslims to do this. Give the rest of us a clear movement to support so that we can support you.
Do I think such a movement is likely to form quickly enough to achieve this? Frankly, no. I have seen some liberal Muslims trying to achieve this. I linked one in the piece. I respect the hell out of them. But is it enough? No. I think anti-Muslim sentiment will continue to rise. I think it will win out. I think the UK will become a hostile place for Muslims and many will stop wanting to come here and will leave. That will resolve some of the legitimate concerns about authoritarian Islam but liberal, reforming and just generally decent and non-authoritarian Muslim Brits who absolutely hold the values we want to prosper and are good friends and neighbours will be the casualties of that. I would very much like that not to be the case but I am afraid it will be. So, I argue for what I think would make that not happen, but I am not optimistic about it.
https://open.substack.com/pub/helenpluckrose/p/reform-is-not-genocide-9be?utm_campaign=comment-list-share-cta&utm_medium=web&comments=true&commentId=192862850